Hologram Man

The future of the 1990s is not here, but it’s alive on my VHS copy of Hologram Man! In the dystopian future version of Los Angeles, people still drive 90s cars, they just stick extra pieces of metal all over the outside. The state of California is now a corporation ruled by Michael Nouri. The human soul is discovered to be a blurry thing that looks just like you, and you can shoot electricity out of it. Also, you can put stage makeup or a polymer coating over your soul when it is removed from your body, and no one will be able to tell the difference between you and a normal person. You can even just kill your body, and go on living as a makeup-covered soul.

I’m getting ahead of myself here, though. There is a plot to Hologram Man beyond wacky visions of the year 2001, sort of. Evan Lurie stars as the bad guy, a revolutionary terrorist who objects to the state of California being run like a corporation. Actually, in the real world, the bad guy here would probably be sympathetic, to be honest, but in the movie he’s a psycho. One day, he plots to kill the governor. He steals a bus full of commuters and tries to ram the governor’s limo. ‘Ello gov’na!

The bad guy goes to jail, where his soul is extracted from his body, but they call it a hologram, I think. Somewhere there has to be a hologram. Then they put his soul in a jar, but they attempt to rehabilitate his body. Does the body move the mind or does the mind move the body? I don’t know!

Hold everything, there is a flag on the play. I can’t write a quality post about this movie and make it appealing, even to me, because it’s just so shit. But I want to stick to my self-imposed regiment of putting up a post at 8 AM three days a week, and once again I’ve procrastinated. What would you do in a situation like this, with a movie this bad? Let’s just try to move forward.

The bad guy can’t be rehabilitated, because he’s just too bad, so five years later the cop who arrested him is at his first parole hearing which is presided over by one of the evil frat boys from Animal House when he escapes. His hologram just walks away because one of the the Larry Darryl and Darryl guys from Bob Newhart is a computer hacker who steals the bad guy’s soul so he can go on a killing spree again. Because when you think of a computer genius, you think of those Larry Darryl and Darryl guys, right?

And so the good guy cop who tried to save the governor at the beginning is obsessed with the bad guy, and eventually in like the last 15 minutes of the movie he turns himself into a hologram too so he can catch him. And both the good guy and the bad guy look like bouncers from a Florida strip club. The bad guy has cornrows, so his soul has cornrows! This is not my perfect vision of the future, movie! Cornrows should not stay on the head of your immortal soul after your body dies, like you’re eternally on some cheap cruise to the Bahamas! Is that why you hear about these old people who permanently live on cruise ships, because they want to keep their hairstyle when they die? I’m not making any sense.

At least there’s one good thing about Hologram Man, in that it features my favorite b-movie action trope (I almost typed tripe, lol): the bad guys display this hilarious and misplaced sense of righteous indignation when you take out their friends while they’re in the middle of trying to murder you. The head bad guy brings his girlfriend along when he assassinates the governor, and then he’s surprised when she is killed by police gunfire while riding the death bus, and this makes him escalate the violence. What did you expect dude? You’re fucking evil! A hail of bullets is kind of what you signed up for when you started a fight with the army of police whose job it is to protect the governor! You have no right to be angry! You should just be like, “oh, ok, you got me,” look at the blood, and fall over dead. Then we would not have been subjected to Hologram Man.

Anyway, that’s Hologram Man. It has made me illiterate. I own this movie because I collect everything I can get my hands on that was put out on VHS by PM Entertainment, which is like an even shittier version of Cannon Pictures. If you should come across any PM Entertainment tapes while you’re out thrift shopping, do not attempt to watch them, because you may injure your brain. Instead send them straight to me, and I will watch them, because my brain is already injured by trying to write about Hologram Man.

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6 thoughts on “Hologram Man”

Two points: first, hard to imagine a “shittier version of Cannon Pictures”, and second, any movie that includes “a corporation ruled by Michael Nouri” is OK in my book! Seriously, the era of truly glorious “bad ” movies seems to have ended in a way – today’s “bad” films are just no fun!

This is itching my brain. I don’t think I’ve seen it, but I feel like maybe the old video place that I frequented (an independent rental store that closed down last year, sadly…had a lot of great obscure titles) had it. It just seems familiar.